a nutshell, link cloaking is a way to protect your affiliate
commissions from being stolen. It's not totally foolproof. Smart
individuals who are well-educated about the matter can still figure
out how to keep you from getting your commission.
But most people won't go that far, so cloaking your links will
prevent most commission loss. How do people steal affiliate
commissions? Well, have you ever hovered over a link and noticed
that the link was an obvious affiliate link?
Some people type in the parent domain instead of clicking the link
as a way of making sure the owner of the site gets paid 100% for
the sale. Some people falsely believe that if they buy from an
affiliate link, they'll have to pay more for a commission mark-up.
Some people actually do it for a different reason. If you're
promoting a ClickBank product, especially to other marketers, many
of them know they can insert their own ClickBank ID and get what's
usually a 50% or more discount on the product.
This is a different type of affiliate commission theft, because the
person doing it gets the affiliate commission themselves, rather
than just making sure you don't get it. Most people don't do that,
of course, but it happens.
Most people are pretty honest, and don't mind giving you a little
affiliate commission in exchange for recommending a good product to
them. But it's enough of a concern that you should take steps to
prevent it.
You can easily set up your own link cloaking system. You can set
up a directory on one of your domains. Most marketers use the
domain of their own name, as in bobsmith.com. Then they typically
have a subdirectory called /recommends/.
Inside of that directory, they create a new subdirectory for each
product, like this: bobsmith.com/recommends/productname. In that
directory, they place what's called a redirect file, which
instantly takes the visitor to the actual affiliate link without
displaying it. You can easily find out how create a redirect by
looking it up online. It's very simple to do.
There are also a number of link cloaking scripts available. Most
of them are relatively easy to install and use. There's a big
benefit to using a script rather than doing it yourself. Using
your simple redirect, there isn't an easy way to check how much
traffic you've sent to your link, like scripts do.
Most link cloaking scripts also allow you to add new links very
easily within an administrative area, and then each link is tracked
so that you can see how much traffic is going through the link. If
you use your own file, the only way to tell how much traffic you've
sent is through your affiliate stats, which may be inaccurate, or
through your web server's stats, which may be difficult to use and hard to understand.
One of the best I've found is ViralURL. I've been a member for awhile now,
and it not only cloaks your affiliate link, it also provides tracking, And the best part,
the basic membership is absolutely free. But I suggest you upgrade using the one time
offer. It's one of the best around, and offers a slew of benefits the free membership does not.
http://dickhalerecommends.info/viralurl OR ... using my ViralURL cloak:
to be sure you are protecting your hard-earned commissions online.
Watch your inbox for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck
with your online marketing efforts!
To your online success,
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P.S. Here's another great resource I created to help you build your
business:
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